1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of Internet Search Engine Technology, specifically, the arena of e-commerce solutions. More Specifically, this invention relates to e-commerce solutions that include target advertising.
2. Description of Related Art
With the accelerated growth of the Internet and its associated e-commerce activities, advertising over the Internet has become increasingly more acceptable to Internet users. Typically, this advertising is accomplished using so-called “banner ads”, which are placed on popular web sites. Web sites having a high page view rate may reach millions of viewers in a relatively short amount of time.
However, relying on banner ads has inherent drawbacks. First, advertisements are made available to the users whether or not these ads have been specifically solicited. Second, banner ads rely on user profiling, which is burdensome to employ. Third, web site owners who are not technically savvy, or without available resources, can not easily acquire user profiling information.
Marketing people are continuously trying to focus and target specific banner ads to a specific audience. Preferably, this specific audience would include those Internet users who would most likely be interested in, and make use of, the advertised product. The current e-commerce approach to Internet advertising has been to display pre-selected advertisements for a general audience or for a target audience based on user profiling. Prior art methods have concentrated on assimilating information from user profiles collected from each Internet user. These user profiles are used to determine the appropriate advertisement banner(s) to display. For example, user profiles may contain the information that a particular user is interested in automobiles, particularly in purchasing an automobile. When this Internet user visits various web sites, the user's profile information may be retrieved and advertisement banner ads about automobiles or related products may be instantly displayed.
This approach provides several challenges. First, the user profiles need to be collected and built, which has proven to be cumbersome work. Second, the information in these user profiles will inevitably change when the interests of a user changes. In the aforementioned example, a user may be no longer interested in buying an automobile simply because he or she has just purchased one. Thus, it is important, yet extremely difficult to ensure these profiles remain current. Moreover, it is also difficult to identify a specific user, i.e., a user interested in purchasing automobiles, and associate the correct advertisement profile to the user. Many efforts within Internet search engine technology are being undertaken to enhance the selection of targeted advertisements based on user profiles, however, the challenges and limitations of such approaches indicate a need for a different method of ascertaining user information, and associating the appropriate corresponding advertisements to certain users.
The instant invention provides a new method and apparatus for associating search result items with similar or related advertisements. It is anticipated that the implementation of this methodology will establish a new avenue for generating revenue from Internet advertisements. Importantly, unlike the current user profiling methods, all web site owners who provide search engine services will be able make use of the instant invention, independent of whether user profiling information can be obtained.
Bearing in mind the problems and deficiencies of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for assimilating and displaying Internet advertisements during an Internet search that can be displayed to the user on demand.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for assimilating and displaying Internet advertisements that do not rely on user profiling during an Internet search to individual users.
A further object of the invention is to provide a more accurate distribution of advertisements to a selected target audience or user during an Internet search for each user request.
Still other advantages of the invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.